When does The Final Shape raid release in Destiny 2?

The Final Shape raid, called Salvation’s Edge, is coming to Destiny 2, and it’ll pit you against The Witness as a capstone to what Bungie calls the Light and Darkness saga. But why is the raid releasing two weeks earlier than normal in The Final Shape?

In this Destiny 2 guide, we’ll tell you when you can play The Final Shape raid and explain why Bungie is breaking convention with its release date of Salvation’s Edge.

Salvation’s Edge raid release date: When does The Final Shape raid release in Destiny 2?

Image: Bungie

In one of the studio’s weekly Destiny blog posts, Bungie announced that The Final Shape raid, Salvation’s Edge, will launch on Friday, June 7, at 1 p.m. ET, just three days after the expansion’s June 4 release date.

Here’s The Final Shape raid release time in your time zone:

• 10 a.m. PDT for the west coast of North America
• 1 p.m. EDT for the east coast of North America
• 6 p.m. BST for the U.K.
• 7 p.m. CEST for western Europe/Paris
• 2 a.m. JST on Saturday, June 8, for Tokyo

In order to enter Salvation’s Edge, your Fireteam leader will need to have completed the Final Shape campaign and the “Wild Card” Exotic quest. According to Bungie, the raid will contain major spoilers for the campaign, so be aware of that if you decide to skip ahead.

For the contest mode in Salvation’s Edge — which runs 48 hours and will make the raid much tougher — you’ll need to be 1965 Power to be an appropriate level for all of the encounters.

Why is the Final Shape raid launching early?

Image: Bungie

If you’re a Destiny 2 veteran, you may be a little confused by the timeline here. Typically, Bungie gives players a little less than two weeks — 10 days or so — to finish the campaign of a new expansion and prepare for the raid. However, most raids involve an end boss that is only tangentially related to the main boss of the expansion, rather than the primary antagonist themselves.

Since Bungie announced The Final Shape, the studio has made it clear that The Witness will be the raid’s final boss. This is a huge step for Bungie, and something its developers have wanted to do for a long time. In a Polygon interview for Destiny 2’s 2022 Witch Queen expansion, I spoke to Joe Blackburn, now-former Destiny 2 game director, about if we’d ever see an expansion’s big bad in the raid again. Blackburn expressed a desire to do that eventually, but said the studio first needed to bring more players into raids. Two and a half years later, it seems Bungie is now confident enough to make that move — likely because of the new in-game Fireteam Finder the studio recently added to the game.

With the raid being such a big cog in The Final Shape’s story, Bungie has clarified that it didn’t want players to have to wait nearly two weeks to finish the story and play the campaign’s eighth mission, which only becomes available once players (presumably) defeat The Witness in the raid. The completion of the raid will also lead to the release of Destiny 2’s first episode — Bungie’s replacement for seasons — which will hit the game on Tuesday, June 11.